World Bank Prez calls for greater role for private sector in climate fight

Washington, June 12 (IANS) Ajay Banga, the World Bank’s new President, called for the private sector to play a larger role to help emerging countries in their battle against climate change in his first interviews on Sunday.

He argued that countries from countries — essentially of the developed world, the World Bank, philanthropies and multilateral development banks (MDBs) will not be enough to meet the requirements of the emerging markets to help them transition from fossil fuel to clean fuel.

“The only way forward is to find a way to get the private sector to believe that this is part of their future,” said Banga, who took charge on June 2 as the 14th President of the World Bank, to CBS news.

He spoke also to CNN and made a similar pitch for scaling up private sector participation.

“What I think we have to do is… to find ways in the MDB system to think of a different playbook — to take on the risks that they cannot take on,” he added.

Banga is the first Indian-American to hold this position and called himself “Made in India” in the CNN interview, when he asked about the need for someone other than an American should lead the World Bank, which has always been headed by an American in an unwritten agreement with Europe, which, in return, gets to name the head of the International Monetary Fund.

Banga said he was born and raised in India and worked in both the developed and developing world and, thus, embodies the kind of diversity people may want to see at the leadership level.

Developing and less developed countries have long argued that in order to transition to clean energy they need help in resources and technology from the developed countries who caused most of the global warming with large-scale and unregulated industrialisation. And a climate fund set up to that effect has fallen way short of the committed targets.